This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Syria caught up in Lebanon fallout’
Gideon Rachman
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s podcast is about Syria and Lebanon. My guest is Kim Ghattas, an FT contributing editor who’s based in Beirut. The fall of the city of Aleppo to rebel forces is a major blow to the Syrian government. So is the Assad regime finally losing its grip?
News clip
These fighters have reignited Syria’s civil war, a loose coalition of jihadis and secular rebels whose lightning advance poses the biggest challenge to President Assad in many years. Their prize: Aleppo, Syria’s second-biggest city, now back in opposition hands.
Gideon Rachman
The Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has been in control of Aleppo since 2016 after finally winning a brutal four-year battle that left large parts of the city devastated. Assad was able to prevail with help from Russia, Iran and Hizbollah, the Lebanese militia linked to Iran. But Hizbollah suffered huge losses in recent fighting with Israel, and that may have opened the door to the sudden advances by the Syrian rebels. Unfortunately for Syria, however, there are many outside forces with a strong interest in the fate of the country. They include Turkey, Russia, Iran, Israel, the US, the Gulf States and various transnational Islamist groups. Before considering all that, however, I began the conversation with Kim Ghattas by simply asking her to recap recent events.
Kim Ghattas
Gideon, it’s been an incredible week in the Middle East. We’ll talk about the ceasefire in Lebanon as well. And this sudden advance of opposition rebels or Islamist rebels, as you want to call them, who suddenly broke through frozen lines of conflict and captured Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, is a development that nobody really saw coming, but has dramatically shifted dynamics inside Syria. And everybody in the region is now scrambling. The Turks, the Iranians, the Russians, the Saudis, the Emiratis, everybody is involved in what was a frozen conflict for many years as Bashar al-Assad thought he had achieved the best outcome he could at the great expense of his people and now finds himself in a newly precarious position again.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah. Obviously, as you point out, we’ve all been taken by surprise by this recent developments. So any predictions have to be offered fairly humbly, I’d imagine. But Assad is in Moscow. Do you think he may be worried that his grip on power is really loosening, though?
Kim Ghattas
Well, he travelled to Moscow briefly, but he did come back, we think, and he met with the Iranian foreign minister, Araghchi, in Damascus. The Iranians were very quick to travel to Damascus to, on the one hand, I assume reassure Bashar al-Assad that they still support him and also send a message to the wider world — we have not abandoned our ally. But the question is, are they really going to deploy again the way they did in 2013, ‘14, ‘15 and more to support him and help him shore up his defences?
It’s a lot to ask of Iran after all this time, particularly because their key ally, Hizbollah, is a spent force now in Lebanon after a year of war with Israel and two very intense months of war inside Lebanon, which decapitated the leadership and killed so many of its footsoldiers and destroyed so much of its capabilities.
It’s ironic because when Hizbollah entered the war in Syria to defend Assad, it made them a more traditional player on the ground, not so much a guerrilla group any more. And that is what exposed their weaknesses to the Israelis, and that has come back to bite them in Lebanon over the last few months. So I think Bashar al-Assad is very vulnerable. That’s not to say that the regime will fall.
Gideon Rachman
Yeah, I mean, looking again at what shifted it, the most obvious thing to point to is the one you were just discussing, the defeat, if one can call it that, of Hizbollah in Lebanon. How important to the whole Assad regime and power structure was Hizbollah? Because they’ve also got the Syrian army and the Russians and Iranian support.
Kim Ghattas
I don’t think that his regime would have survived without Hizbollah on the ground and Iran and then the Russians. Hizbollah went in first, of course, with back-up from the Iranians. The Iranians sent more reinforcements and support. And then eventually, after the infamous or famous red line that Barack Obama put in 2013 around the use of chemical weapons, there was a deal made with the Russians how to sort that out without going into US military strikes against Syria. And then eventually that opened the door to full Russian involvement in Syria in 2015. And that is what saved Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
And if you don’t have these three elements working together full-on to support Bashar al-Assad, I don’t think he can survive from a military perspective. Of course, there are ways that he can survive by dealmaking, which is what he refused to do over the last couple of years. And that’s why he finds himself now in a position where he may have to negotiate under the gun.
Gideon Rachman
And who would he be negotiating with?
Kim Ghattas
Everybody wants a piece of Syria. The Turks, of course, have been backing Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist rebel opposition group that is positioned in north-west Syria close to the border with Turkey. And there’s some assumption that Turkey either gave a green light to this offensive by this group or there was a tacit understanding that this was the right moment. Bashar al-Assad had refused to negotiate with the president of Turkey, Erdoğan, about creating, in essence, a larger safe zone with accepted delineation of borders to which Syrian refugees in Turkey could return safely. And it is that refusal of negotiations by Bashar al-Assad that I think led the Turks, but also others, to give up on a negotiated compromise with Bashar al-Assad.
He rules over a divided country, possibly with the vision that he can still recover the rest of it, but he doesn’t have what it takes militarily to do so. And the key issue for a country like Turkey is the number of Syrian refugees that are in Turkey. And the Turks would like those refugees to go back to Syria. Most of them probably don’t want to go back to regime-controlled areas, so they want to go back to the area around Idlib. And that’s what the Turks were hoping to achieve via negotiations. And I think the outcome eventually, even though we shouldn’t be in the business of predictions, will likely be a divided Syria with an agreement that parts of it will be ruled by entities other than Bashar al-Assad in a way that is formally accepted.
Gideon Rachman
But tell me about the rebels, because they are described as Islamist rebels routinely. They had links to al-Qaeda in the past, and that immediately gets everybody in the west extremely nervous. They waged a war against Islamic State not so long ago, which kind of arose out of some of the chaos of the Syrian war and out of Iraq. So is there a danger that we’re seeing the birth of another kind of Islamic State?
Kim Ghattas
I don’t believe that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — HTS — will be able to advance much further. I’m not a military expert, but I think they will stall in their advances now. I’m very keen always to make sure that in these conversations or in these situations, we listen to the voices of Syrians. And there are so many of my Syrian friends who are absolutely overjoyed that Aleppo has been liberated from the regime and they are not Islamists themselves. They understand the dangers of a group like HTS taking over Aleppo, but they are also so relieved that Aleppo is free from the control of the regime and they hope that they can very soon visit again.
And we’ve seen already streams of people coming back into Syria because those areas have been liberated from regime control, because the one thing that we forget amid policy conversations in the west about how bad the Islamists are or how convenient Bashar al-Assad is, is that over 90 per cent of people who died in that civil war died at the hands of the regime and its backers, including the Russians, who indiscriminately bombed hospitals, schools, villages and are at it again now. When the Russians sent reinforcements over the last two days, they didn’t really do that in a very strategic way or tactical way to repel the advances of the rebels. They mostly bombed civilian targets.
Having said that, you know, HTS are not exactly lovely people. And so it is a little bit a question of being stuck between two bad options. They have moderated over the last few years. They’ve learned some of their lessons. They renounced their ties to al-Qaeda. And it was interesting to see their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, put out statements and messages reassuring Christians, Alawites in Aleppo, that they have nothing to fear and calling on his followers and supporters to make sure that they entered Aleppo and made clear that everybody was welcome and a citizen of Syria and so on. And there have been videos of Christians in Aleppo walking around talking about how they’re about to celebrate a Christian holiday, Saint Barbe, I think it’s called in English, St Barbara, and then Christmas. So there is an effort at least to show a sense of normality. But we’ll have to see how things unfold. War is messy and things could go terribly wrong.
Gideon Rachman
And when we talked about how the Turks have been involved and about the Iranian response and what they still have to offer, the Russians have clearly come back in. Another play, of course, is the Gulf States. And I see the UAE has come out in support of Assad. So what’s going on there?
Kim Ghattas
We have to watch the Gulf very, very closely. Absolutely, the UAE has come out in a statement of support. That doesn’t mean they will do anything militarily per se on the ground, but they have had an effort to normalise with Bashar al-Assad after years of break in diplomatic relations. Similarly for the Saudis, Bashar al-Assad was invited back to the Arab League. He attended a summit in Jeddah, and then a few weeks ago in Riyadh itself, he met with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince. So the Gulf is probably also taken aback by this. They were trying to normalise relations with Bashar al-Assad. So they’re watching very closely. And we’ll have to see which way they are going to land on this. The UAE probably doesn’t want to see the fall of Bashar al-Assad. I suspect it’s possible that many in Saudi do, but they’ll have to weigh the importance of the different fronts that they are leading.
And the other front is normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran and trying to keep Iran in the Gulf’s good graces while Iran is also being targeted by Israel, which is something that is not that much to the displeasure of the Gulf but they also don’t want it to go too far because they don’t want to become the target of Iranian retribution. So it’s quite complex. And it reminds me of a drawing I saw once by a satirist in the Arab world who had all the different players on a piece of paper and lots of lines going in all sorts of different direction and says, if you don’t understand the Middle East, this is it. It is complex. There are a lot of interests at stake, people pulling in different direction.
Gideon Rachman
What about other players? What about, for example, the US, which still has troops in the area?
Kim Ghattas
The Biden administration has been very silent as this unfolded. US forces did target Iranian assets in Syria. So that was, in a way, an indirect message about how the US perhaps also thinks that it can assist to some extent in squeezing Bashar al-Assad from the south as HTS squeezes Bashar al-Assad from the north. Does the US want to see Bashar al-Assad fall? Probably not. They would not want to have to handle this in the waning months of the Biden administration, but squeezing Bashar al-Assad and getting him to the table, I assume, would be a welcome thing. There’s efforts by the US and the Gulf over the years now to try to peel away Syria from Iran, which is really a tall order because Bashar al-Assad owes so much to Iran. But they keep trying.
And now that Bashar al-Assad is under so much pressure and wants to probably try to save his regime as he finds himself squeezed between the Turks in the North, Israel in the south and the west, and the potential of further uprising in the south of the country and Deraa, he may possibly be more open to appeals for moving away from Iran in return for sanctions relief. And that’s why, of course, the Iranian foreign minister also rushed very quickly to Bashar al-Assad to appeal to him to stay in the Iranian camp.
Gideon Rachman
What about Israel, which deliberately or not, seems to have occasioned this change through its attacks on Hizbollah?
Kim Ghattas
Yeah, the timing has certainly been interesting. I mean, this is an offensive that it would have taken a long time to prepare, but clearly the ceasefire was in the offing. So this has been work in parallel, preparing the offensive and watching Hizbollah being decimated in Lebanon. When it comes to Israel, their approach to Syria has always been better the devil we know than the one we don’t. So better to keep Bashar al-Assad. The Assad family has served in many ways Israel’s interests very well over the last few decades, never igniting the Syrian-Israeli front on the Golan again, but working through proxies in Lebanon to pressure Israel. Israel has been over the last few years, regularly bombing Iranian assets and Hizbollah and weapon shipments that come through Syria.
But there is a realisation now in Israel, I believe, from speaking to my sources in the region, that the devil they know has actually made things worse for them and has allowed Iran and Hizbollah to grow more powerful on Israel’s eastern flank. And that needs to come to an end. And we heard that from Benjamin Netanyahu himself actually over the last few days. He threatened Syria because they’re worried that if they want to keep the situation in Lebanon in control, you have to interdict weapon deliveries to Hizbollah and those weapons get delivered through Syrian territory.
Gideon Rachman
Now, the other decision that Netanyahu and the Israeli government made just recently was to sign up to a ceasefire in Lebanon. How durable do you think that ceasefire is going to be?
Kim Ghattas
There have been so many violations of the ceasefire on both sides already that it is incredibly tenuous and fragile. This isn’t 2006, the last time that Israel and Hizbollah fought a war, when the minute the ceasefire was agreed, the Israelis withdrew. Hizbollah and villagers from south Lebanon went back into southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs and reconstruction started. This is, first of all, a 60-day period during which the Israelis will slowly withdraw and the Lebanese army will slowly move in and take over those areas. That was not clear to Hizbollah supporters, to the Shia population of southern Lebanon, villages that have been destroyed or people from the southern suburbs.
And we saw the flood of people driving towards southern Lebanon the minute the ceasefire was declared last week, and that has led to many violations because that was not part of the agreement. But that was not explained by Hizbollah to its base and people. Neither was it explained by the Lebanese government, because this is in many ways a bad deal for Hizbollah, and they don’t want to admit it because they have lost and they have dragged Lebanon into one of the most devastating conflicts in this country’s history of conflicts with Israel.
And so you are going to see violations by the Israelis because people are getting too close to the border. Hizbollah is trying to be active close to the border under the guise of civilian clothes. And, of course, you know, Israel, I think, was never going to fully accept stopping overflights of the country with drones or others. So it is very tenuous. It has to be overseen by this monitoring mechanism that has been put in place. That includes now the US and France. And how exactly they’re going to do this. Are they going to go through the list of violations every day and say, this is OK, but this is not OK? It actually sounds like a recipe for this ceasefire failing, but we’re all hoping that it will hold.
Gideon Rachman
And taking a step back, I mean, it’s been said for a while now that the most powerful single political military force in Lebanon was Hizbollah. Is that now no longer the case? And if so, does that mean a whole new political dispensation in Lebanon?
Kim Ghattas
Hizbollah was not the most powerful political military force in Lebanon. Hizbollah is or probably was the most powerful non-state military actor in the region, if not the world. And they are a spent force. They are on the back foot in Lebanon because there is a renewed sense of courage among the Lebanese to speak up against Hizbollah. The chokehold it has held over Lebanese politics and the terrible war-and-peace decisions that it has taken for this country without asking anyone.
But Hizbollah can regroup, and that is going to depend on the continued courage of others in Lebanon and regional backing and international support for the Lebanese as they speak out and stand up to Hizbollah and I think demand that it becomes just another political party in Lebanon. As for their regional role, it’s hard to make predictions in this very unstable region, but I believe that they will not be able to operate the way they did before in Syria or in Iraq or in Yemen, partly because I think Israel will continue to come after them. And there is a point at which possibly the Iraqis will start pushing back as well against Hizbollah and Iran’s free rein inside their own country.
But a lot, Gideon, depends on international support for this moment in Lebanon, for reconstruction, for political solutions to the political deadlock and regional support, because the Lebanese are often asked, why don’t you rise up against Hizbollah? And people forget that the Lebanese have risen up against Hizbollah many times, but they’ve been assassinated for it or beaten on the streets during protests.
And what the Lebanese have found is that there is often a lack of international support. The west and Arab countries often have preferred to go down the diplomatic route to resolve issues before they become too serious on the ground. And that has, over time, given Hizbollah more and more political power. And it’s not about asking the international community to show up militarily or sending the marines. Far from it. It is just about not agreeing to political deals where the fine print actually gives Hizbollah more power.
Gideon Rachman
Finally, Kim, I mean, you were in Beirut for most, if not all, of this latest conflict. Lebanese have said to me in the past they hate the fact that the country is described as resilient because it sort of implies that it can just take any amount of battering. But what was the mood in Lebanon? Do people feel now that despite everything that’s happened, there is now some hope, or is it just feeling like a downward spiral?
Kim Ghattas
There is some hope, but it is, as I said, tenuous. It’s fragile. People can’t believe that the shelling is over, that the drones are no longer there. They were briefly back on Sunday, I believe. The war was very noisy and it really affected everybody. Physically, almost. I was really shattered by the loudness of these incredible big booms that these missiles were causing in Beirut. The last few days were one of utter panic because suddenly Israel was sending evacuation warnings for places across the city, places they hadn’t bombed before.
You know, the southern suburbs are not some remote village distant from Beirut. They are part of the city. A lot of these missile strikes were in the heart of Beirut in the final weeks of the war because the Biden administration had managed to agree with Israel that they wouldn’t strike Beirut so much any more after the first two weeks. But after the election of President Trump, it was no holds barred and the Israelis started bombing regularly at all hours of the day, the southern suburbs of Beirut and then many parts of the city, as well as, of course, southern Lebanon, where more than 30, 40 villages have been completely levelled.
So, to recover from the impact of this intensity of warfare and the noise is going to take time for the Lebanese people. I think they will try their best to have a good Christmas. Thousands of Lebanese are flying into the country to see their loved ones, check on their property, planes are full and that’s just how the people of this country cope with hardship and war. Yes, we don’t like the word resilience because we would like not to just survive any more. We really would like to live. And resilience has also meant that we put a band-aid on problems and we don’t resolve them from the core. And that’s something that I think we really need to do now. I do think that despite the horrors of this war, there is an opportunity to build something better for the future.
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Gideon Rachman
That was Kim Ghattas, FT contributing editor and distinguished fellow of Columbia University, speaking to me from the US. That’s it for now. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.